Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Mark Alpert's "The Furies," the movie

The Furies is a mash-up of genres. It’s a science thriller about witches. Ariel Fury, the heroine, belongs to an ancient clan that has been steering the course of history for millennia. She has red hair and green eyes, the markers of a genetic mutation that has long made her family a target for mass murder. During the 16th and 17th centuries the witch-hunting mobs in France and Germany and England accused the Furies of being witches and burned nearly all of them at the stake. The few survivors fled to the wilderness of America and spent the next four hundred years living in seclusion. But revolutionary advances in genetic research in the 21st century trigger a civil war among the Furies, threatening to reveal their secrets and wreak havoc across the globe.

The book’s hero, John Rogers, meets Ariel at a bar in Greenwich Village. John is an ex-thug who formerly belonged to a drug gang and is now trying to go straight. He’s delighted when Ariel invites him to a tryst at her hotel, but their lustful encounter is interrupted by a band of rebellious Furies who ambush Ariel and nearly kill her. As John helps the wounded young woman return to her family’s compound in the woods of northern Michigan, he’s caught in the middle of the war among the Furies -- and both sides want him dead.

As I wrote the novel it ran through my mind like a movie, sort of a cross between...[read on]